The United Nations is appealing for $3.1 billion to reach 62 million children at risk in humanitarian crises worldwide, including those living in Ukraine, Syria and other conflict zones and in areas affected by the Ebola epidemic. From the AP:
UNICEF said Thursday the largest portion, $903 million, would be targeted to help children with immunizations, safe water, sanitation and education in and around Syria.
Another $500 million would be directed to helping Ebola-affected communities with treatment and prevention programs.
The agency is seeking some $32 million for Ukraine, where it says 600,000 people are internally displaced and some 1.7 million children are affected.
The appeal, aimed primarily at governments, is $1 billion more than sought last year. UNICEF achieved a little more than half of the 2014 target.
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Global Health and Development Beat
2014 was a turbulent year for human rights in Africa, says Human Rights Watch in its annual report released Thursday. The international watchdog group says sectarian violence and “abusive responses of government forces” fueled many conflicts in the last year. Released on the eve of the African Union summit, the report also notes that African leaders have been too slow — or too unwilling — to react.
The Ebola epidemic in West Africa appears to be on the decline, with new weekly infections dropping below 100 for the first time in over six months, the World Health Organization said Thursday.
One of the Ebola vaccines about to enter testing in Liberia may not be as potent as researchers had hoped, according to a new study, raising questions about how well it will prevent infection.
First results from a human trial of an Ebola vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline show it is safe and generates an immune response, scientists said on Wednesday, but larger trials are needed to see if it protects and if a booster is needed.
The Brussels-based section of Medecins Sans Frontieres will pull out of war-torn parts of Sudan due to a lack of cooperation from authorities, the medical charity said on Thursday, as the country sees an uptick in violence.
Nigeria on Thursday confirmed that the H5N1 strain of bird flu has spread from seven to 11 states within a week, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of poultry but no human cases.
Syrian authorities and insurgents have allowed the Red Cross to deliver growing amounts of aid under local ceasefires since August, in a possible harbinger of reconciliation in the civil war, an ICRC official said on Thursday.
The murder of a young Argentine girl on a beach in neighboring Uruguay shook both countries and drew attention to a kind of violence that goes almost unnoticed as a cause of death among Argentine adolescents: femicide.
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Spotlight on PSI
When journalist Holly Gordon started researching the best interventions to solve poverty today, she and her team weren’t looking for a gender-specific or sector-specific solution. But they couldn’t avoid one: girls’ education, which became the clarion call in the documentary Gordon’s organization of the same name ultimately produced, Girl Rising.
Gordon, now CEO of Girl Rising, joined PSI President and CEO Karl Hofmann recently for a conversation with the Young Presidents Organization, a global peer network of chief executives and business leaders in 125 countries. They spoke about the challenges they faced and lessons learned in overcoming them as part of their respective organizations’work to improve the lives of girls and women around the world.
“If you’re a journalist, the definition of an extraordinary story is if there’s a simple truth which, if broadly applied, would create extraordinary social good,” said Gordon. “That’s a huge story. Imagine if there was a pill that would cure cancer. That story would be everywhere. That’s how we felt about girls education.”
That message came as something of a surprise even to PSI, an organization with roots in women’s and girl’s issues like family planning and contraception. “Even we realized we didn’t have enough data about the scope of [educating and empowering girls],” said Hofmann.
Read more about the conversation here and listen in here.
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Buzzing in the Blogs
The Africa Check blog digs into the question as to whether 60% of South Africa’s estimated 150,000 sex workers HIV-positive. Here is what it finds:
The small sample sizes and the limited areas in which the surveys were conducted mean that they cannot be generalised to make the claim that 60% of sex workers in South Africa are HIV positive, Dr Alasdair Reid, a Senior Strategic Interventions Adviser at UNAids told Africa Check.
For example, it was unlikely that the 2005 Durban survey – which focussed on 775 high-risk women (not all of whom could be described as sex workers) – would be representative of all female sex workers.
“We know that HIV prevalence in the general population varies markedly by geography, sex, age group and urban and rural areas,” Reid said.
The data is also old. Some of the surveys date back nearly twenty years. The most recent was conducted a decade ago. And data, unlike wine, doesn’t age well. Patterns change. It stands to reason that a study done in 1996 could yield very different results if conducted in 2015.
“[The prevalence rate] could have gone up or down or stayed the same, or could even have gone up in the interim and started to fall,” Reid said.
(snip)
The claim that 60% of sex workers across South Africa are HIV-positive cannot be substantiated by the very limited surveys conducted to date. The available data is old. No national surveys have been conducted. The studies that have been published focused on very specific geographic areas and relied on small sample sizes.
Understandably though, researching HIV-prevalence among the “hidden population” of sex workers is an immensely difficult task. And as limited as they are, the findings of the studies that have been published to date – and the study that is due to be published next month – give a frightening indication of the extent of HIV infections in the cities and communities surveyed.
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Capital Events
Friday
8:30 AM – International Health and Nutrition Workgroup Planning Meeting – SID
12:15 PM – Accelerating Progress to Overcome Malnutrition – IFPRI
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By Mark Leon Goldberg and Tom Murphy
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Disclaimer: Opinions presented in this email do not necessarily reflect the views of PSI.
